Towards Serious Games for Improved BCI

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, or technologies that use online brain signal processing, have a great promise to improve human interactions with computers, their environment, and even other humans. Despite this promise, there are no current serious BCI technologies in widespread use, due to the lack of robustness in BCI technologies. The key neural aspect of this lack of robustness is human variability, which has two main components: (1) individual differences in neural signals and (2) intraindividual variability over time. In order to develop widespread BCI technologies, it will be necessary to address this lack of robustness. However, it is currently unknown how neural variability affects BCI performance. To accomplish these goals, it is essential to obtain data from large numbers of individuals using BCI technologies over considerable lengths of time. One promising method for this is through the use of BCI technologies embedded into games with a purpose (GWAP). GWAP are a game-based form of crowdsourcing which players choose to play for enjoyment and during which the player performs key tasks which cannot be automated but that are required to solve research questions. By embedding BCI paradigms in GWAP and recording neural and behavioral data, it should be possible to much more clearly understand the differences in neural signals between individuals and across different time scales, enabling the development of novel and increasingly robust adaptive BCI algorithms.